In the past few years, blogging has evolved into a web publishing system that: (1) orients users to make short pointed posts on a specific topic; and (2) allows related sites to easily link to each other. This simple feature set has enormous implications for business communications over the Internet.
The course proposed here is designed to expose students to the business implications of weblogs and the resulting weblog communities. The course needs to have an easy hands-on element to get students' feet wet and then a good conceptual framework to help students understand how they might profit from growing use of weblogs and similar technologies. I've sketched out what four sessions over two days might look like.
Session 1 — A hands-on introduction to blogs and blogging communities
Here, I anticipate that students will create blogs using either typepad or blogger. They could also use MyST Technology's blogsite tool if it is sufficiently developed. We will demonstrate how easy it is to get started with a blog (as noted recently by Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley).
I will then show how students can aggregate blogs into a community where members can easily see and communicate with each other, all the while maintaining their own site independence. To demonstrate the idea of aggregation, I will likely use sage which runs in the Firefox browser. I will also want to demonstrate easy ways to post to a blog from a browser.
Session 2 — Sources of business value in blogs and blogging communities
Blogs and blogging communities actually have separate value propositions. To put it succinctly, blogs present the following value components:
- Easy web publication.
- Easy content syndication.
- Easy linking.
All three of these amount to making it easier to get the word out. Web publication is normally a chore requiring knowledge of html and how to load files on web servers. Content syndication is an emerging, alternative form of web publication that allows other sites to disseminate a site's content with attribution. Some companies (Small Time News in Ann Arbor) are actually able to charge sites for the right to syndicate their content. Most sites just allow free syndication of their content because they view it as a form of advertising. Easy linking allows companies and individuals to more easily create paths between related content.
Blogging communities build on these components to create additional value:
- Highly interlinked content across individual sites based on users' perceived relevance.
- High volume content creation within the semantic norms encouraged by the community.
These last two features lead to high web visibility. If a site has high web visibility, it means that people searching for the type of content that site provides will have a high likelihood of finding the site. Sites in blogging communities become more visible because related content is connected, and more is continuously being created, two key features of the algorithms that determine site placement in search engines.
Session 3 — Valuing your company's increased visibility from participating in blogs and blogging communities
One means of obtaining greater web visibility is to purchase it from a search engine provider. We will review Google adwords. Google adwords allow companies to purchase placement in the sponsored links that appear to the right of search results in sites like Google. We will likely discuss Menlo Innovations (of Ann Arbor) as a case study in cost vs. benefits.
Google adwords save site owners from having to play the pagerank game for achieving web visibility. Pagerank is part of the algorithm search engines use to determine companies' placement in the main search result (i.e., in the non-sponsored links). In this light, we'll then discuss paid search in general and search engine optimization.
For many reasons, we might consider the amount people would be willing to spend for search engine visibility as the lower bound on what they would pay to be in a blogging community. As noted, belonging to a blogging community increases search engine visibility, frequently to levels equivalent to what can be achieved with tools like adwords. Further, because blogging communities are a network of interlinked sites, they provide visibility beyond that provided by pure search engine placement. For instance, blogging communities' interlinked structure helps create word of mouth among a real existing community, and the links provide natural transitions between sites without having to engage in search.
Session 4 — A note on web-site effectiveness
Blogging and blogging communities present both a challenge and an opportunity for web-site effectiveness. Most sources on web site design suggest carefully architecting the site to make information visible and frequently updating information to keep users coming back.
As noted, blogging and blogging communities increase external site visibility and facilitate rapid content updating. However, blogs may sometimes run counter to a coherent site information architecture. This is because blogs tend to act as one side of a community conversation. Their content is driven as much by what is going on around them as by a company's or individual's communication plan. It is easy to get off message.
We will examine different blog sites in light of this observation and note different strategies for staying on message.
